The Future Poetry

332 The Future Poetry

see quantitative feet come to coincide exactly or predomi-
nantly with stress or accentual feet in Harvey’s hexameter
verse, —

Fa

_

me wi ̆th a ̆|bu

_

nda

_

nce|ma

_

ke ̆th a ̆|ma

_

nthri

_

ce|ble

_

sse ̆da ̆nd^4 |ha

_

ppy ̆.|

In Sidney’s line

These be her words, but a woman’s words to a love that is eager

there happens to be a similar predominant identification of
quantity with accent or stress and it is this that makes the line
readable. In reality these are stress hexameters, for in each there
are syllables, as inwo

|

̆man’s,lo

|

̆ve,ha

|
̆ppy, which are long by
stress only and not by either inherent or positional quantity. But,
on the other hand, feet which would be trochees in accentual
or stress verse are reckoned here quite artificially as spondees,
abundance,woman’s, because of the two-or-more-consonants
theory; but the closing syllables of these two words, if listened
to by the ear and not measured by the eye, are very clearly
short, even though not among the shortest possible, and it is
only by a violence of the mind or a convention that they can be
reckoned as long and this kind of very slightly loaded trochee
promoted to the full dignity of a spondee. Evidently, we must
seek elsewhere for a true theory of English quantity and a sound
basis for quantitative verse.

A Theory of True Quantity

If we are to get a true theory of quantity, the ear must find it; it
cannot be determined by mental fictions or by reading with the
eye: the ear too in listening must exercise its own uninfluenced
pure hearing if it is not to go astray. So listening, we shall find
that intrinsic or inherent quantity and the positional sound-
values are not the only factors in metrical length, there is also

(^4) The wordandhere ought by the classicist theory to be long because of its two
consonants after the vowel and still longer because it is further supported by the initial
hofhappy.